Here’s an interesting interview with Louis Suarez-Potts, “community manager” of OpenOffice.org. I really like the point she is making: free software is all about communities, it is all about politics. Free software is, in part, politically motivated which is an important difference with the typical small software motivated by financial gains. Of course, OpenOffice.org is backed by Sun Microsystems which, I hope, is in it for the money, but many of the contributors around them are there for political reasons: they want OpenOffice to support such a langage, such an operating system or such a technology. A company like Microsoft is mostly cut out from such support.

We see an understanding of this dynamic in Brazil, where the government is behind OpenOffice.org and open source in general. We see this in India and elsewhere, where governments understand that they can support OpenOffice.org and they can support open source, and the people who are benefiting are the localities. It is a politically inexpensive but valuable logic.

A nameless university is using Oracle’s jinitiator applets on some management web sites. Jinitiator is just Oracle’s version of the Java JVM, but you can use any recent JVM and be happy. The trick under Linux is to fool the browser into interpreting the mime-type “application/x-jinit-applet” (specific to Oracle) as just an ordinary applet. As it turns out, you just have to edit a small text file called pluginreg.dat.

Reference: Oracle Apps on Linux – AVallark.

See also my posts Oracle buys Hyperion, JOLAP versus the Oracle Java API, IBM, Oracle and Microsoft freeing their databases and Oracle and MySQL — is MySQL in a weak position?

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Some nameless university has some management web site requiring Internet Explorer. If you ask me, that’s a lot like requiring GM cars on some highways. Such a web site is no longer a web site, but an Internet Explorer site.

You can often get around these problems by using a Firefox extension called “User Agent Switcher”. It adds a menu and a toolbar button to switch the user agent of the browser. In effect, the web site will be fooled into thinking it is dealing with Internet Explorer.

My only regret is that unlike Konqueror, it seems Firefox cannot spoof only specific web sites. You switch your user agent for all sites at once.

Spam bots killed my server. I had fancy spam filtering code in place, but it was taking too much juice to filter all the crap being sent at me. This blog is now read-only. There are just too many people buying penis enhancers and falling for get-rich-quick scams. Stop wasting your money.

The 17^th International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications (DEXA 2006) call for papers is out. It will be held in Krakow, Poland.

The aim of DEXA 2006 is to present both research contributions in the area of data base and intelligent systems and a large spectrum of already implemented or just being developed applications. DEXA will offer the opportunity to extensively discuss requirements, problems, and solutions in the field. The workshop and conference should inspire a fruitful dialogue between developers in practice, users of database and expert systems, and scientists working in the field.

Oracle has recently bought Innobase which makes one library MySQL relies upon for storing its tables. One user on slashdot had the following insightful comment:

Among the technologies that MySQL licenses from third parties under commercial redistribution licenses:

Berkeley DB (Sleepycat Software)
InnoDB (Oracle, formerly Innobase)
MaxDB (SAP AG)

See the problem? MySQL itself is largely a language parser and a simple and technically inadequate storage engine (for anything where data integrity matters). In other words they don’t own any of the foundations of their technologies.

This is interesting. We always encourage developers to use and reuse existing libraries. Should MySQL be blamed for doing so?

The comparison with PostgreSQL is interesting. PostgreSQL works in a decentralized way as opposed to MySQL which is developed by single company, using libraries.

I think that MySQL could definitively be a fragile product whose development could be impaired through various business decisions. However, I think it has nothing to do with the fact that MySQL relies on libraries it hasn’t written, but rather on the fact that there is no community of MySQL developers.

Free Sofware is not a cure to the world’s hunger.However, building software using a highly distributed community might very be the best possible way to develop generic software.